Malcolm Whitehead, Head of Discovery and Learning at ZSL London Zoo suddenly resigned last week. Malcolm Whitehead | ISOTOPE It is not know why exactly he resigned but a possibility is a major conflict with the Directors above. When Ken Livingstone (former Vice-President of ZSL) was Mayor of London, he enabled a sponsorship deal for the "ZSL Outreach" Programme, which has continued under Boris Johnson. This has enabled Primary and Secondary Schools in London's State Schools to visit London Zoo free of charge. I have heard, from an unconfirmed source, that Malcolm Whitehead resigned as those above him wanted to bring in extra charges whereupon the Local Education Authority and the School itself would have to contribute monies to their visit. Does anyone know whether this is true?
No idea what lies behind Malcolm's resignation. London is a zoo which is plagued by school groups who are often ill-behaved and unsupervised, so anything which reduces the numbers of such groups would be good by me - even if it does rather run counter to one of the zoo's main objectives. Malcolm is, in many ways, a brilliant man - both in that he is brilliantly talented, and also he is a fine chap. He's never been an easy person though, and I am sure there will be two sides to this story. It is a great shame though - not least because his column was one of the few things worth reading in the otherwise execrable ZSL magazine, Wild About.
I very much doubt that anyone would resign over a funding stream like that being cut. I mean surely everyone's expecting that to happen with all of the kneejerk cuts that are happening in Britain at the moment. It wouldn't be a surprise let alone something to resign over. The zoo would have no control over it anyway so what would resigning gain? No other zoo in the UK has that funding and museums' free entry is set to be cut so where would he be planning on going if that was the raison d'etre for his resignation?
